“No!” Arch said. “He didn’t say that.”
“He most certainly did,” Lydia maintained. “And imagine what the Bradfield campaign could do with it.”
Bo said, “Good work, Lydia. But we have to decide at what point to leak that news to the best advantage. Indeed, we have to establish some sort of order for these revelations, perhaps in ascending rank of vilification. Maybe we could start with something simple like the sneaking into the movies, and build up from that.”
“Look, guys,” Arch said, “if this fantastic scheme is going to work at all, it’s got to hit all at once, like a ton of bricks. If we just leak out one little scandal at a time, it will, to use Harry’s metaphor, be like hors d’oeuvres to whet their appetite, not quench it.”
“I stand corrected,” Bo allowed.
Cast interjected, “Could I get some clarification on one essential point? Are we going to confine ourselves to actual bad things that Vernon Ingledew has done? I mean, if we’re limited to only the truth about his past, we might not have enough food in the pot to quench anyone’s appetite. As long as we’re going to heap scandal upon him, why limit ourselves to verifiable misbehavior? Let’s fabricate aspersion and innuendo!”
There was a long silence as the Samurai considered Cast’s suggestion. Harry broke it by saying, “That’s what I assumed we’d do when I first made the suggestion. Perhaps I didn’t make myself clear.”
Bo remarked, “Yes, Harry, but it was Cast who made it clear. Brilliant idea, Cast my boy. Now let’s brainstorm!”
The rest of the meeting was a lot of fun. Each person taxed his or her imagination to come up with a whole disgraceful history for Vernon, and before the afternoon was over they had enough, as Bo put it, “to utterly crucify him, which it might do if it backfires.” Harry offered up all the most flagrant misdeeds he had anthologized throughout his sordid career. Lydia herself contributed no small portion of the outrageous sins and transgressions of Vernon Ingledew. Their detraction of him was so ingenious and thorough that they all became rather disrespectful, even antagonistic, toward their candidate. “Why are we working for this jerk?” Harry wanted to know, and his remark drew the intended laughter as well as a feeling of guilt and unease.
Vernon Ingledew slept with his mother until he was nine, at which point they were discovered in a posture that was not sleeping by Hank Ingledew, who forthwith expelled Vernon from his mother’s bed. Thereafter he systematically seduced each of his five older sisters (“Make it only four,” Monica suggested, “so it might look more credible if one of them held out.”) He also relieved his carnal appetite with the family cow. He was expelled from school in the seventh grade for persuading a girl to accompany him to the cloakroom for immoral purposes during recess, but his expulsion was rescinded when he began an affair with the school’s young principal. He was only fourteen when she had to leave her job, and the state, because she had become pregnant. Two of his sisters had to have abortions. The cow ran off and was never found.
His adult misbehavior included such things (actual) as feeding his hogs the leftover corn mash from the Chism’s still, which kept the swine constantly inebriated, the real secret of the superiority of Ingledew Ham, and (fabricated) he kept them shot full of steroids and other chemicals to enhance their growth and succulence. His immoderate income from the ham processing business was supplemented by his secret ownership of Chism’s still and the trademark for “Chism’s Dew” was registered in his name. Further, he devoted the most secluded parts of his vast acreage to the growing of marijuana, of which he and everybody else in Stay More were constant users. Although he’d been living with his first cousin Jelena since he was nineteen, when he paid her husband a large sum of money to move to California, he had confessed as his ambition to get it on with every female in Newton County, and was keeping a list; at last count, he still had a few hundred more to go.
The reason there are no churches in Stay More—the closest being the Buffalo Church four miles to the north—is that Vernon owns all the land (almost true) and has made a pact with the Devil to keep churches out. And the reason the Stay More school has been shut down for forty years is that Vernon has such unhappy memories of being in trouble during his school years (that young principal, etc.) that he hates education: the main reason he never went to college. He was now actively engaged in an orgiastic intrigue, abetted by peyote, not only with a Native American beauty but also with her homosexual manservant.
When they were all finished brainstorming, the portrait of Vernon Ingledew they possessed was so nefarious that they cringed in revulsion. “Do you think anyone will buy it?” Bo wondered.
“The point is,” Arch reminded them, “that no one will want to buy it.”
“It’s beyond my wildest dreams,” Harry Wolfe observed. “It’s the dirtiest dirt I’ve ever seen. Such a pity that almost none of it is true.”
“How are we going to leak all this stuff?” Cast wanted to know.
“I can take care of that,” Lydia assured them. She did not want, not yet anyway, to tell them that she had received a handsome offer from the Bradfield campaign to become a renegade. But she had begun to entertain a devilish stratagem: she could pretend to switch sides, and in the process leak all of these tidbits craftily so that the Bradfield campaign would use them. In effect, she would be a double agent. The prospect was almost like something you’d read in a spy thriller, and it excited her. She noticed now that everyone was looking at her, waiting for her to continue. “Just leave it to me,” she told them. “I can think of all kinds of ways to get this dirt disseminated.”
“Well, then,” Bo said. “Are we agreed that we want to do this? Or should we put it to a vote?”
“Your call, Boss,” Arch said. “But hadn’t we better find out what Vernon thinks of the whole thing?”
The meeting concluded after a lengthy discussion of whether or not they should summon Vernon forthwith to present him with the scheme they’d devised and the ugly picture of himself they’d fabricated, or perhaps have a special meeting for that purpose the following day, perhaps up at Vernon’s house. If the latter (and it was too late in the day now to think of extending this meeting), then should they make an effort to hold the meeting so that Jelena should be excluded? Should she be made privy to their falsehoods and, worse, their truths, e.g., the “orgiastic intrigues abetted by peyote”?
Cast Sherrill, who continued to be a house guest of Vernon and Jelena during these subsequent visits of the Samurai to Stay More (although he was spending more and more of his nights with Sheila Kimber at her house), and who consequently knew Jelena better than the rest of them (except Bo, of course) offered the opinion that Jelena be given full rights as participant in the “plot,” and that she might thus even be able to reveal some things, true or false, about Vernon that nobody else knew or could invent.
Harry Wolfe said, “Hell, for that matter, why don’t we ask Vernon himself to confess to any misdeeds that nobody else knows about?”
Lydia was unable to determine who fiendishly cackled at this idea; maybe all of them did. What bad people we are! she reflected. It was decided to reconvene the Samurai the following day at Vernon’s house. Arch gave Lydia a ride in his Chevy pickup to Day’s and Diana’s, where they would spend one more night. Lydia was beginning to miss her apartment in Fayetteville, and her cats. But there was one more thing she wanted to do here in Stay More. Because she had heard so much about Daniel Lyam Montross, whose bedroom/study she used, and had taken the trouble to read a copy of Some Other Place. The Right Place., which Diana had loaned her, she had developed a suspicion that his spirit—not exactly his ghost—still inhabited the place. Just last night, sometime after midnight, she had had insomnia and had taken the silver flask out of her purse and had several swallows of vodka, and—of course it was quite possible she’d just dreamed all this—a man had sat on the side of her bed and asked her for a swig, and she’d given it to him, more than once (certainly the silver flask was empty the
next morning) and they had talked, and he had told her that he was going to be her protector. “What do I need protection for?” she’d asked him. You’ll see, he’d said. And the next thing she knew it was daylight and she was left with the conviction that she was waking up from what had not entirely been a dream.
After supper, Lydia asked Diana if she could tell her how to find the grave of Montross, which was supposedly nearby. Diana said she’d be very glad to take Lydia to it, but Lydia insisted that she’d prefer to visit it by herself. It wasn’t far, Diana said: you just go up that old logging trail there, straight up the mountainside a little ways, and you’ll come to a thick grove of cedar trees (which Day maintained), with a glade on a bench of the mountainside. And the tombstone is in that glade. You can’t miss it.
So in the gathering dusk, Lydia took a little hike to the cemetery-of-one, the gravestone in the clearing, and stood there reverently for several minutes to gaze upon the inscription:
DANIEL LYAM MONTROSS
June 17, 1880 – May 26, 1953
The last Montross of Dudleytown
The only Montross of Stay More
“We dream our lives, and live our sleep’s extremes.”
She recognized the last line as a quotation from his own poem, “The Dreaming.” And thought it was very appropriate and perhaps even meaningful in view of her dream (or vision) the night before. It was growing dark, and she wanted to be back to the house before she’d need a flashlight to get her there. But she felt a special kinship for Montross. The man who’d sat on her bed last night—assuming that was him, or his ghost—was extremely appealing: kind and rugged and good-natured and witty.
She closed her eyes to see his face again. And that was her last sight of anything. Suddenly something shrouded her—a blanket or a large bag—and she felt herself covered and clutched by massive arms. She tried to lash out her fists but her arms were held tightly within the cloth container. She screamed. Somebody had slipped a sack over her and was now lifting her and carrying her off! She tried to scream again but a hand clamped over her mouth within the sack and she could only mutter her scream. Nothing like this had ever happened to her before, and it was undignified and unheard-of and terrifying. Whoever was carrying her—or was there more than one?—must be very strong because she wasn’t exactly a lightweight. The feet of the person were pounding down the trail; she had enough sense of gravity to know that they were going down, and she overcame her panic enough to reach the decision to wait until they were nearer the house of Day and Diana before she tried to scream again or struggle again.
But when they were approximately where—she could only guess—the logging trail emerged onto the property of Day and Diana, a man’s voice said to her, “Hush, and you will not be harmed.” She tried to identify the voice, but it was no one’s she had heard before, not even the singular voice of Daniel Lyam Montross, so she could dismiss her fleeting thought that she was being abducted by the ghost of a man who didn’t want her visiting his tombstone. She believed the voice’s warning, and did not try to scream, although instinctively she kept trying to struggle within the confines of the sack.
They went on and on, until she knew they were no longer anywhere near Day’s and Diana’s. Finally the voice said, “Now I am going to sit you down, upon a seat, and you must not try to move until I tell you, or I will have to hurt you.”
She came down off the man’s shoulder and found herself sitting in something cushioning—her back and bottom supported almost in comfort after being carried aloft down the trail. Then she heard a motor start, and realized that she was inside of an automobile. Just what kind of automobile she couldn’t begin to guess. It didn’t sound like any car she’d heard before, just as his voice didn’t sound like any voice she’d heard before. The car began to move.
“Who are you?” she asked. But he did not answer. “Don’t you realize you could be getting yourself into real big trouble, doing this?” she demanded. He did not answer. “I assume you know who I am and that you’ve got a motive for kidnapping me, but I wonder if you realize the consequences.” When he made no response to that, she told him about the consequences. “The Samurai will track you down and bring you to justice and you’ll spend the rest of your life in jail!” That provoked no response from her abductor either, so she continued. “Are you employed by Governor Bradfield? Or his manager, Billy Joe Slade? Are they pissed off because I wouldn’t accept their offer to defect from the Ingledew campaign? Well, then, the joke’s on you, because even before you snatched me I’d made up my mind to switch over to the Bradfield team. Not only that, but I’ll tell you all you could ever possibly want to know about Vernon Ingledew’s shady history. Now why don’t you take this bag off of me and we can discuss this like civilized people?” When that had no results, she demanded, “Do we have to drive all the way to Little Rock like this?”
But they were not, apparently, going to Little Rock. After a long while on what felt like a bumpy dirt backroad, and then a longer while on a jolting logging road or forest path, the car came to a stop, and the motor was turned off, and her kidnapper said, “Now you must walk, because I can’t carry you. It’s steep and uphill from here on.”
Chapter seventeen
The bejeweled fucking fairyland that is Little Rock from the air at night on landing was beginning to pall for Harry; he scarcely gave it a glance. He’d made this trip so often he felt like a commuter, a feeling that was confirmed when the particular cab driver at the airport said “The Capital, right?” The more trips he made to Little Rock, the more he began to appreciate the occasional idyll in Stay More. A city man all his life, he never dreamed he’d develop such affection for the sticks. He’d even discovered something wondrous: Saturday nights in Stay More he didn’t seem to need as much booze to make him happy as he required elsewhere.
But now he appreciated the parallel: that this, his second and last chapter, was beginning in exactly the same way that his first, Chapter Seven, had begun: arriving in Little Rock by air, checking into the Capital Hotel, plugging in his modem, and getting ready to go out and conquer the goddamn world. It was not just closure, it was enclosure, a fucking parenthesis that seemed to suggest that life was not utter chaos after all.
There was a big difference, though. That first trip, he’d made contact with his old pal the political paragrapher Hank Endicott, made the useful acquaintances of librarian Bob Razer and of oppo man Garth Rucker, lured the latter away from his employer, and compiled some handy dossiers on the opposition. Not much, but a good week’s work, which played no small part in getting Vernon Ingledew past the primary.
Now his mission was far more serious, and far more demanding of his talents, not as a muckraker but as a sleuth. He was going to infiltrate the goddamn Bradfield organization. He was going personally to find out what they had done with poor Lydia, and he was going to rescue her. And into the bargain, giving a grand climax to the whole operation and to this his final chapter, he was going to effectuate the crafty plan to bring down Bradfield not by impugning him but by making the public sick and tired of his impugnings of Vernon Ingledew. To amuse himself before going to sleep in his nice room at the Capital, he mentally projected onto the ceiling a whole Hollywood movie of the story. His part was played by Drew Carey or John Goodman, and Lydia was played by Michele Pfeifer. Maybe they’d have to get Diane Keaton or Kathleen Turner. But central casting would really have to scrape the bottom of the barrel of slimy villains in order to cast Billy Joe Slade and Carleton Drew and Rafferty Oates and especially Governor Bradfield himself. Harry grinned with considerable satisfaction over the scene where John Goodman whips out his gun and informs those rascals that he’s been a counterspy all along, and demands to be taken to wherever they’re keeping Lydia.
But Bo hadn’t permitted Harry to purchase a gun. “If they’ve got her,” Bo had said, “and if you can somehow find out where they’re keeping her, you’ll have to go in and get her out without the use of any force. That’s too dang
erous.” And Bo had impressed upon him the need for haste: the Newton County Sheriff’s department had agreed to wait not more than forty-eight hours before reporting the kidnapping to the Arkansas state police and the FBI and thus presumably to the newspapers and television. But Harry knew enough about the mechanics of kidnapping to realize that the longer they waited, the longer she was kept alive, the better her chances for coming out of the ordeal unscathed. So while he was mindful of the forty-eight hour deadline, he was in no great hurry.
One problem, as he told Hank Endicott the next day, not over drinks in the Capital bar but over coffee at a nice place called Community Bakery, was that it was only a supposition that the Bradfield people had kidnapped Lydia. In fact, as soon as the news was permitted to break (and they had agreed to keep it quiet for at least forty-eight hours, to give her time to return, and to give the Newton County sheriff’s office time to complete their investigation), all of the attention would be focused upon the Bradfield people anyhow.
“Who else would have taken her?” Hank asked.
“Well, the sheriff has been questioning everybody in Stay More,” Harry said. “Even me.”
“Is it assumed she’s been harmed?” Hank asked. “Was there any evidence of blood or anything?”
“That long-overdue thunderstorm we had yesterday morning washed away all the tracks, car tracks and people tracks, near the spot where Lydia was last seen, or rather where she had gone to inspect this little cemetery off in the woods. So it’s not even known if she actually left that cemetery. She simply failed to return to the house where she was staying.”
“Whoever took her,” Endicott said, “should have realized that she is such a well-known figure in Arkansas politics and journalism that this is going to be big news. And I’m eager to do a column on it, as soon as I can. I’m getting antsy, Harry.”
The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 2 Page 133
